Kaban Lake

The master plan for the Kaban Lakes in Kazan advances the Elastic Band as its governing design concept, seeking to weave a continuous landscape network along the chain of upper, middle and lower lakes that revives both ecological and cultural memory while pointing toward Kazan's future growth. Conceived as a piece of green infrastructure on which every citizen and every lakeside development can depend, the band treats water as the city's new ecological heritage, linking the Volga with the Kazanka River. Local legend holds that treasure lies at the bottom of the Kaban; the Elastic Band is offered as the treasure of a new era, a living public realm that stretches between the city's past, present and future and allows people to connect with nature while transcending themselves. Rather than treating the three lakes as separate water bodies, the plan binds them into a blue-green network that winds along the embankments and infiltrates into different districts of the city, gradually becoming the common standard for Kazan's natural, cultural, social, tourism and transportation development. The band is simultaneously a sponge-like stormwater solution, absorbing and releasing water through porous ecological swales that regulate flood control and improve the urban water ecology. The plan responds to a difficult set of conditions: polluted water and fragile ecosystems, a complex multi-ethnic historical layering, the conflict between private and public lakefronts, a discontinuous slow-traffic system, overstretched public facilities, and a lack of interpretive material about the lakes and their communities. Three strategies organize the work: letting water lead the spatial development of the city, activating the lakefront through water-sensitive design that reshapes land development, public gathering and pedestrian and bicycle connectivity, and revealing the many legends of Kazan on the lakeside greenway. Covering 1,138.52 hectares at the planning scale and 19.08 hectares of designed landscape, the project aims to turn the Kaban Lakes from a buried legend into an ecological-cultural infrastructure that anchors Kazan's next millennium.